In Defense of Snow Days

Inconvenient? Yep. Unpredictable? Sure. Disruptive? Yes. But a snow day is also a minor civic miracle, and we ought to treat it as such.

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

THE EXCITEMENT STARTS BUILDING the night before, when temperatures begin to drop. The night air turns sportive, feral, running off with your breath when you step out the door. The stars glitter like they know a secret. Anticipation is half pleasurable fear: What if it doesn’t happen after all? What if it doesn’t come? That would be unbearable, now. Children sweat through probabilities and superstitions like hardened Vegas gamblers. Is not doing the assignment a sign of faith that guarantees the outcome—that there will be no one to turn it in to the next day? Or is it presumption that invites a sickeningly foreseeable contrapasso?

You go to bed, hoping. A snow day is coming. Please God, let it come.

And in the morning, the world is transformed.

It is too quiet, which is what wakes you first. What might, in another context, signal terror—unnatural silence, daily life stilled, a white shroud—is only joy. The snow has come. You leap down the stairs, where the radio is already switched on, and there you wait, a cell of solidarity with your fellows all across the region, for the magisterial authority of KYW 1060 or its equivalent to confirm for your ears what your eyes have seen. School is closed. It’s not just snow. It’s a snow day.

For generations of children and adolescents, snow days have been, hardly less than Christmas, the reason winter exists in the first place. Each one is a small civic miracle, a day officially allotted to bus rides and long division spent instead in sledding and snowball fights. You have hot chocolate for breakfast and hot chocolate for lunch. You wear pajamas and snow pants. You trespass with abandon, as neighbors’ hills and public streets become fair game.

Even the snow days that disappoint, when the snow turns slushy or stops falling too early, have their own magic—never getting dressed, long hours reading Nancy Drew or building pillow forts or watching movies, and outside, a beautiful world. But on the best snow days, you crash and fall without pain; snow melts on your eyelids and runs down your collar and you are still warm—because your parents wrapped you up well, but mostly because you are alive, and happy.

The snow day is in danger. COVID-19, indirectly and years after the fact, is threatening to kill it. In the wake of the pandemic, when already-nascent Zoom schooling capacities were rapidly tested and expanded, hosting classes completely remotely became a possibility. Suddenly, the official rationale behind snow days was gone. It was possible to have children in school regardless of the weather—and if it was possible, surely it was incumbent. Our national literacy levels, an administrator might reason, are nowhere near high enough to justify taking unnecessary breaks. Thus, some school districts have chosen to change snow days into remote learning days (despite the gods of anarchy occasionally having their revenge).

This is a mistake. School closures already disrupt parent’s schedules. To add the mutual misery of supervising remote learning removes any upside, any possibility of taking a force-majeure family fun day or turning the kids out of doors and letting the snow be your sitter. And most children do not have such an unimpaired relationship with the physical-social world that we can afford to herd them back to the computer whenever it issues its grim summons.

A year without snow days means even fewer days a year that there are children out of doors: muddling the boundaries between private and public space, kicking up a ruckus, inviting comment and spectators, intervention and hospitality; buzzing around and making new friends, the pollinators of civic life. My whole life, I will remember the kindness of my seventh grade basketball coach and his wife, who lived a few doors down in a twin house on a little hillock of a yard. We were probably the reason grass never grew very well. Every year they let us turn that hillock into a sheet of muddy ice with our sleds, all day and late into the night, under an enormous moon that made the snow sparkle purple and gold—a secret and mysterious world of majesty, laughter, and rippling light revealed in the unplowed street.

Our neighbors helped us doff our coats when we filled their tiny living room, breathless and defiling every surface we touched with dirty meltwater. They gave us hot chocolate piled high with mini marshmallows. They talked and laughed with us like we were the most interesting people in the world. What is the point of trading out days like this to stay in private homes, duly and dully hitting metrics? On what basis do administrators claim that their imperatives are worth passing up a chance to learn that the world can be so beautiful, that such people inhabit it? Our national literacy levels are nowhere near high enough to justify the imposition of TeachHub on days the buses can’t run.

I have a counter-proposal. Instead of taking snow days from children, let’s make them a true civic occasion. Let’s extend them, as far as possible, to adults. What constitutes a snow day is always highly regional. Places where snow is more of a fact of a fact of life than a precious interruption invest in more preparation, and have a higher bar of winter fury to meet before buses must be cancelled and roads closed. There is little danger that, outside of truly apocalyptic circumstances, the United States will ever experience some kind of total economic shutdown because school closings trigger office and retail closings. What triggers a school closing in Alabama is never going to trigger school closings in Idaho or upstate New York. But even for these places, it would be nice to have one ceremonial snow day built into the calendar—perhaps for the first big snow of the year, the way the first day of hunting season means a holiday in parts of Pennsylvania.

Global warming seems set to change the seasonal cycles of our world much faster than we are accustomed to; in many regions, this may be the last generation that will experience regular snow as a fact of life. If we are condemned to mourn the snow, we should take the time to remember what it has meant to us, and to enjoy its unexpected gifts while we still have them.

But no one can fully see the future that lies beyond all models; maybe we are not condemned to lose the snow. Snow always comes, after all, as a reprieve. However well-forecasted, it arrives as a rebuke to predictability. It forces a focus on essentials, and brings to the fore latent possibilities. Whatever it touches, it stills, simplifies, hallows and remakes in its own dazzling image.

This sense of reprieve, of the suspension of predictable rules, is the most important reason we should extend the benison of snow days instead of taking them from children. Order—in daily life, in the home, in the economy—is necessary. Studying and working are important. Being diligent in your tasks and reserving your leisure for reasonable appointed intervals is difficult, and valuable. Diligence in labor is what puts food on the table and books in the libraries. But if some degree of diligence grounds the possibility of continuing human life and civilization, it is easy to set up quantifiable achievement as an infinitely maximizable good—as the end and measure of all human activity. Every once in a while, it’s good to experience leisure that is not appointed, not at the ordained interval—that arrives like a thief in the night and melts away with a change in the weather.

It is good to get the snow shoveled and the people and animals fed, and after that, to let the rest of the rationally ordered to-do list howl at its ill-use outside in the cold. It is good to enjoy, for one day you did nothing to cause and nothing to earn, the gift of being nothing but alive and happy in the beautiful world.